Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: global warming

Today’s Washington Poststory by Darryl Fears on California drought frequency in a warming world compelled me to take a look at the Golden State’s temperature history. In my 2011 book Climate Coup, I showed that the alarm over California warming was rather odd, as most of the changes had taken place thirty years previously.

You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.

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In this week’s You Ought to Have a Look, we’re going to catch up on some new climate science that hasn’t gotten the deserved attention—for reasons soon to be obvious.

First up is a new study comparing climate model projections with observed changes in the sea ice extent around Antarctica.

While everyone seems to talk about the decline in the sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, considerably less discussion focuses on the increase in sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere. If it is mentioned at all, it is usually quickly followed by something like “but this doesn’t disprove global warming, it is consistent with it.”

But, even the folks delivering these lines probably realize that the latter bit is a stretch.

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

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On Page 3 of Friday’s Washington Post is (yet another) lurid climate story, this time about mega-droughts of several decades that are going to pop up in the Pacific Southwest around 35 years from now. The findings are based upon the UN’s climate model suite that, according to our presentation to the American Geophysical Union, is in the process of failing, because it just isn’t warming at the rate they project. Here, for example, is a graphic from John Christy and Dick McNider of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, showing the growing disparity.

The work cited in the Post ignores this teensy-weensy little problem and, instead drives the models with the UN’s biggest scenario for future carbon dioxide emissions, something that natural gas, which emits much less carbon dioxide than coal when used for electrical generation, is in the process of burying.

But it gets worse.

Droughts in the Pacific Southwest are usually broken by the big pacific climate oscillation known as El Niño. They occur every four to eight years or so. So, in order to have decades of drought, there has to be decades without El Niños.

The overdriven, overheated climate models used in this study cannot simulate them with any degree of realism.

That’s why, in the Post article, study co-author Toby Ault

had a word of caution. Weather conditions can vary, climate impacts can be mitigated, and the warnings of the study might not come to pass. A single El Niño weather pattern in the West could interrupt periods of prolonged drought.

At least younger climate scientists like assistant professor Ault are getting wiser. The fates willing, he’s going to live another 35 years, and we hope much longer. And when those pesky El Niños (along with many other potential co-conspirators) destroy the forecast of gloom and doom, he’ll be able to say that he warned that could happen, because the models his team used didn’t have a good handle on them.

The Obama Administration is sticking to its talking points claiming climate change affects us more than terrorism. It might be valuable to compare and contrast the real life affects Americans endure from both of these threats.

First, let’s take a look at climate change’s effects in the United States: Hurricane power, when measured by satellites, is near its lowest ever ebb. There’s no change in the frequency of severe tornados. The relationship between heavy snow and temperature is negative along the East Coast. Carbon dioxide and longer growing seasons are significantly increasing the world’s food supply, and there’s no relationship between global temperature and U.S. drought.

Compare this with the effects of terrorism: On September 11, 2011, terrorists took down the World Trade Center and nearly an entire side of the Pentagon, extinguishing 2,996 lives. As a result, every American’s privacy is assaulted by the government on a daily basis—and let’s not talk about what they’ve done to air travel, or worse, Iraq. We’ve managed to remain in a perpetual state of war, unleashing a wave of federal spending our great grandchildren will be repaying.

Perhaps next time President Obama skips the TSA lines to fly around the world on Air Force One (on the taxpayer dime, emitting the carbon of which he’s so scared) he should look down at Arlington National Cemetery at the tombstones left from the reaction to terrorism–it’s an excellent reminder of the real cost of government action.

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

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As the snow keeps piling up in Boston, so does the climate change nonsense. Never letting a good weather story go to waste, our nation’s scribes are in high dudgeon that global warming is causing the serial burial of Boston.

We discussed the illogic (or at least the selective reasoning) behind the global-warming-made-this-snowstorm-worse excuses forwarded during the first big nor’easter to wallop the area (back on January 27th), and now, after the third big event (with likely more to come!) the din is deafening. Just today there are major stories in USA Today and the Washington Post strongly suggesting that global warming enhances snowfall in New England.

Perhaps we can test this hypothesis, glibly hiding as a fact.

Back in the late 1990s, we were involved in a research project investigating the relationship between winter temperature and winter snowfall across Canada. Our results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal Geophysical Research back in 1999. We weren’t investigating the meteorology of any one specific storm, but rather the climatology (i.e., the general relationship) of temperature and snowfall, looking to see if there were really places that were “too cold to snow” and whether a warming climate might result in more snowfall, or precisely what is being presented as fact today.

Matt Drudge has been riveting eyeballs by highlighting a London Telegraph piece calling the “fiddling” of raw temperature histories “the biggest science scandal ever.” The fact of the matter is some of the adjustments that have been tacked onto some temperature records are pretty alarming—but what do they really mean?

One of the more egregious ones has been the adjustment of the long-running record from Central Park (NYC). Basically it’s been flat for over a hundred years but the National Climatic Data Center, which generates its own global temperature history, has stuck a warming trend of several degrees in it during the last quarter-century, simply because it doesn’t agree with some other stations (which also don’t happen to be in the stable urban core of Manhattan).

Internationally, Cato Scholar Ross McKitrick and yours truly documented a propensity for many African and South American stations to report warming that really isn’t happening. Some of those records, notably in Paraguay and central South America, have been massively altered.

At any rate, Chris Booker, author of the Telegraph article, isn’t the first person to be alarmed at what has been done to some of the temperature records. Others, such as Richard Muller, from UC-Berkeley, along with Steven Mosher, were so concerned that they literally re-invented the surface temperature history from scratch. In doing so, both of them found the “adjustments” really don’t make all that much difference when compared the larger universe of data. While this result has been documented by the scientific organization Berkeley Earth, it has yet to appear in one of the big climate journals, a sign that it might be having a rough time in the review process.

One of the concerns expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with respect to the potential impacts of CO2-induced global warming is an increase in the number of heat related deaths, which they predict should occur in response to enhanced summertime temperature variability and more extreme heat waves, particularly among the elderly.

Is this really the case? A new paper published by Bobb et al. (2014) in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives provides an answer.

In prefacing their work the team of four U.S. researchers writes “increasing temperatures are anticipated to have profound health impacts,” but they say “little is known about the extent to which the population may be adapting.” Therefore, they decided to examine “the hypothesis that if adaptation is occurring, then heat-related mortality would be deceasing over time.”

To accomplish this objective, Bobb et al. used “a national database of daily weather, air pollution, and age-stratified mortality rates for 105 U.S. cities (covering 106 million people) during the summers of 1987-2005,” employing “time-varying coefficient regression models and Bayesian hierarchical models” to estimate “city-specific, regional, and national temporal trends in heat-related mortality and to identify factors that might explain variation across cities.”

With respect to their findings, Bobb et al. state “on average across cities, the number of deaths (per 1,000 deaths) attributable to each 10°F increase in same-day temperature decreased from 51 in 1987 to 19 in 2005” (see Figure 1). Furthermore, they report “this decline was largest among those ≥ 75 years of age, in northern regions, and in cities with cooler climates.” In addition, they write “although central air conditioning (AC) prevalence has increased, we did not find statistically significant evidence of larger temporal declines among cities with larger increases in AC prevalence.”

Figure 1. The number of excess U.S. deaths (per 1,000) attributable to each 10°F increase in the same day’s summer temperature over the period 1987 to 2005. Adapted from Bobb et al. (2014).

Based on these findings, Bobb et al. conclude the U.S. population has, “become more resilient to heat over time”—in this case from 1987 to 2005—led by the country’s astute senior citizens. This discovery, coupled with many other similar findings from all across the world (Idso et al., 2014), adds yet another nail in the coffin of failed IPCC projections of increased heat related mortality in response to the so-called unprecedented warming of the past few decades. Perhaps it is high time for all the other apocalyptic projections of the global warming movement to be removed from life support, as they are each equally failing in comparisons with real world data.